Cause of Patton Park fish kill a mystery

Hendersonville Mayor Barbara Volk was out for a stroll with her husband and grandsons in Patton Park Tuesday afternoon when they encountered something unexpected.

By Nathaniel AxtellTimes-News Staff Writer

Hendersonville Mayor Barbara Volk was out for a stroll with her husband and grandsons in Patton Park Tuesday afternoon when they encountered something unexpected.“As we crossed the bridge, we said, ‘Let's see if can see any fish,'” Volk said, relating the conversation with her grandkids. “And there were dead fish.”Volk used the city's “SeeClickFix” cellphone app to report the fish kill, which several other citizens called into the Henderson County Fire Marshal between 3:30 and 4 p.m.Roughly 70 to 100 fish ranging from 1 to 7 inches in length were found belly up in Brittain Creek, a tributary of Mud Creek that winds through the park, Assistant Fire Marshal Joe Swain said late Tuesday afternoon. Most were found along a stretch from the park's administrative office downstream to the last footbridge.State water quality officials took samples from the creek, as did the Environmental and Conservation Organization. Brittain Creek is one of 26 biological monitoring sites that ECO samples for bug life twice a year and one of 33 sites tested monthly for 11 chemical parameters.State officials who responded to the fish kill said determining its cause will be difficult. “Whatever killed them was a real acute event,” said Susan Wilson, an environmental engineer with the N.C. Division of Water Quality's regional office in Asheville, holding a plastic bag of dead mottled sculpins and suckers. “Usually by the time we get here, whatever it was is gone (downstream).”Chlorine was one suspected cause, since the affected stretch of stream was downstream of Patton Park's pool. But Swain said he contacted a city supervisor, “and he said if they drain the pool, it discharges directly into the wastewater system, not the creek.”“You don't know whether somebody dumped something, it gets dispersed so quickly,” Swain said.On a positive note, officials spotted a school of minnows still swimming in the creek, so some aquatic life avoided the kill.Brittain Creek, spelled Britton on some maps, is considered “pretty impaired,” said Seirisse Baker, ECO's water quality administrator. Data collected by ECO shows the creek's Patton Park stretch suffers from high amounts of sediment from erosion and stormwater runoff. “It's an urban stream that faces a lot of threats,” Baker said, including heavy metals and oil running off nearby pavement into the stream. However, compared to others in the Mud Creek watershed, she said its water quality ranks in the middle of the pack, with an “average” chemical rating.Water samples collected by ECO Tuesday afternoon will be sent to the Environmental Quality Institute, an independent lab in Asheville, for analysis, Baker said.Reach Axtell at 828-694-7860 or than.axtell@blueridgenow.com.